1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the management of computer network printing and the auxiliary use of automatically generated printed advertising content onto printer cover pages or onto individual printer content pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Public printing in higher education institutions has gone through some dramatic changes in the past 20 years. There was a time during much of the 90's and early 2000's that printing was entirely subsidized in academic institutions. Since the early 2000's, that model has shifted to a cost recovery model for public printing in these same institutions. By 2005, most public and private institutions like had begun charging for printing to recoup the entire cost of printer leases, paper, toner as well as the service contracts. In some cases, institutions make a modest profit depending on their volume of printing. In 2010, many institutions have again shifted to a more hybrid model of cost recovery for printing. Many institutions are opting for a predefined amount of free prints (usually between 50 & 500 impressions) and then charge after that threshold has been reached.
In the Higher Education market, public printing is further compounded by the fact that printing is handled in a decentralized way. Within each University, there are many departments that might host and consequently subsidize printing for the campus. Computer labs within each school or department, student affairs and libraries all handle printing policies, printer contracts, and pricing separately. This makes it difficult to implement a one size fits all printing policy for an entire University.
This pattern has been remarkably similar in Public Libraries as with that in the higher education counterparts. One notably difference is that Public libraries never fully subsidized printing the way higher education had in the 1990's. Instead, Public libraries had settled for a cost recovery model early on. Today those cost recovery models are still in place but often times the public libraries subsidize a portion of free printing to the public. This portion of free printing is usually along the lines of 10 free impressions per day.
In universities, libraries, or other public institutions, a large number of users share a small number of printers. When a user prints to a specific printer or a bank of printers, it is useful to identify this user's document when they are printed. While several methods of doing this exist, including printers that wait for a user to enter a code to retrieve his document, and printers that deliver documents to a mailbox or carousel, the most common method of identifying printed documents is to print a cover page preceding the document. The cover page often, but not always, is of a different color of paper, different size, or other distinguishing characteristic that makes it easy to identify the beginning of a printed document in a stack of many printed documents. Such cover pages often include data printed on them such as the computer name of the user who printed it, technical numbers that track the print job, the printer name to which it was send by servers, and other data.
Typically in such printing environments the cost of printing each page of paper varies greatly. Minimum base costs can be estimated as between ¼ to ½ cent per page for letter sized paper and ½ to 2 cents per page for depletion of printer consumables such as toner, imaging drum life, and printer useful life.
A minor element of these overall costs represents the identifying cover sheet, in which most of the paper area is blank space. In a large printing environment the printing of cover pages represent thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of printing costs per year. And, this is a fraction of the overall costs of the entire printing volume, whether subsidized by the institution or reimbursed by the individual users.
Consequently, any method or mechanism that can further subsidize the individual users, and/or reduce the overall printing costs to the institution, would be welcome and beneficial to these institutions and their users.